Professor Peredur I. Lynch BA PhD

Background

Professor Peredur I. Lynch is a native of Carrog in the old county of Merionethshire. After graduating in Welsh at Bangor, he was employed between 1985 and 1990 as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, Aberystwyth. He was then appointed to a lectureship in the Department of Welsh at the University of Wales, Swansea and returned to Bangor as a lecturer in 1995. He was awarded a Chair in 2005 and now serves as Head of the School of Welsh.

He is an expert on the Poets of the Welsh Princes and made a major contribution to Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion (‘The Poets of the Princes series’) (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991-96), the groundbreaking critical edition of their poetry. He is also a renowned authority on the development of cynghanedd (an intricate feature of traditional Welsh strict-metre poetry): his survey of Dafydd ap Gwilym’s cynganeddion – the most exhaustive analysis to date – was published in 2003 in Cyfoeth y Testun, eds Daniel et al. (Cardiff: University of Wales), 109–47. Between 2002 and 2005 he led a research project on prophetic Welsh poetry of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The project was supported by the AHRC.

During 2004–5 he also co-directed a research project, with Dr E. Wyn James of the School of Welsh, Cardiff University, to prepare an online index of eighteenth-century Welsh ballads. The project was supported by the Language and Literature Committee of the University of Wales’ Board of Celtic Studies.

At the 1997 National Eisteddfod he was invited to deliver the University of Wales Eisteddfod Lecture entitled “Problemau Prifysgol” : Saunders Lewis a Phrifysgol Cymru’ (‘“University problems”: Saunders Lewis and the University of Wales’).